A decade ago the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber was forced to adjust to a totally new life. After playing his instrument for several hours a day since his early teens, a neck injury forced him to turn his back on 40 years as a virtuoso performer. Newspaper headlines at the time reflected public surprise and the dismay of fans.
The Independent called it a “shock retirement”, while the Guardian talked of Lloyd Webber’s grief at the end of such a celebrated career.
But this week Lloyd Webber revealed a secret. He has been learning to play once again... and is to return to the concert platform with a trial performance this spring.
“I began just playing scales a few weeks ago,” he says. “I tried a whole piece, but quickly realised it was not going to work. I had to build up to it. So I did 15 minutes, then half an hour. Then I managed an hour. Now I can’t wait for the concert. I just hope I can do it.”
Back in 2013, the damage to his neck – a herniated disc caused by the repeated bowing action of his right arm – meant his ability to perform drained away with little warning. Medical opinion suggested little could be done, barring a very risky operation on the nerves in his neck.
Related articles:
“I was not in real pain, it was just that I had lost the power in that arm, so I could only play for 10 minutes,” he said.
Known for his definitive interpretations of landmark works of classical music, Lloyd Webber, 74, who is the brother of the composer and musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, won a Brit for his recording of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto and had premiered many new pieces by modern composers, such as Malcolm Arnold and Philip Glass.
No longer able to perform at the standard his audiences expected, Lloyd Webber believed that the writing was on the wall: he and his beloved Stradivarius, a rare instrument he had bought in 1983 for £192,500, must be parted for ever.
So, two years after playing for the world at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, the musician sold his cello. “I shut the door because it was too painful emotionally,” he says. He pledged to never play again.
‘It was a challenge but it feels as if a big void has been filled by the surprise return of my lifelong friend’
Julian Lloyd Webber
“It was really strange and scary. There were immediate practical and financial worries, but mainly I felt the devastation of losing everything I had worked for since I was 13. I had practised a lot each day. If I didn’t have a concert I often did six hours. So that was gone from my life.”
A job as principal of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire came to the rescue. The coaching of gifted students there took the place of playing. “I’d always been interested in bringing on young musicians, so I felt very lucky. Pretty soon I was as ambitious for the conservatoire as I had been for my own playing. I loved it there and never thought I would go back to cello. I hardly even touched one.”
But at night Lloyd Webber’s dreams repeatedly took him back to the concert hall. “I dreamed about playing all the time,” he says. “It was usually that I found myself on stage playing a concerto I had not learned, that nightmare scenario.”
And three months ago Lloyd Webber had a change of heart. At home alone one day in the Kensington apartment he shares with his wife, fellow musician Jiaxin Cheng, and their teenage daughter, Jasmine, he picked up his wife’s cello and attempted to play for the first time in 11 years.
“I didn’t say anything, not even to my wife, because I was so nervous,” he says. “People who have never played a cello would not realise that the tension of the strings, particularly high up, is really like a knife going into your fingers. You have to get used to that, so at first I thought it was a ridiculous idea. It was the hardest challenge, but it feels as if a big void has been filled by the surprise return of my lifelong friend. It feels like finding myself again.”
As the old skills slowly returned, there was another unexpected benefit: the anxiety nightmares about performing stopped.
It was a remark made by his daughter that had persuaded him to try. “Jasmine said it was a pity she had never seen me play live, and at the time I was planning the programme of a charity concert to be staged next spring at London’s Wigmore Hall for my 75th birthday. Someone had suggested I should play something and suddenly I thought, why not?”
He asked the instrument dealership J & A Beare Ltd if it could help and he tried out four or five good cellos. Lloyd Webber chose an antique Italian instrument made by Matteo Goffriller with a dark, rich tone he loves, although he admits feeling unfaithful to his old Stradivarius.
On 14 April the cellist is to be joined on stage at the Wigmore Hall by the acclaimed brother and sister, Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason. Lloyd Webber said he spotted Sheku’s talent immediately when was a judge for the string category on the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year in 2016. Sheku went on to win that year’s title. Lloyd Webber has also invited other musicians he has worked with or mentored to play on the night, including Rebeca Omordia and Lauren Zhang, who won BBC young musician in 2018 while she was his student at the conservatoire. His wife will also play a piece by her beloved Bach.
Before the concert, in aid of the Music Masters educational charity, Lloyd Webber will also record a short piece he has composed in honour of Jasmine, his daughter. It is an appropriate “thank you” to her for bringing him back to the stage.
“I know my injury is still there,” he says. “It’s never going to go away and I can’t play the bigger things I love. But now I’m wondering, maybe I can still perform what I can do.”
Photograph by Sophia Evans/The Observer